Heather Wright/The Independent

Sandra Hartman is expecting a lot of calls at Christmas for Everyone this week.

The team of volunteers has been preparing Christmas hampers for people in need since 1971 with fire departments delivering boxes of food and toys to Petrolia, Warwick, Brooke-Alvinston, Dawn-Euphemia, Lambton Shores and Enniskillen. This week, volunteers have taken over the auditorium at New Life Church to pack the boxes being delivered Thursday.

Hartman, spokesperson for Christmas for Everyone, says over 400 families will receive help, far fewer than the 468 who received boxes last year. Part of that, she says, can be attributed to the postal strike.

CUP-W and Canada Posts negotiations stalled in November and by Nov. 15, the workers had walked out with Canada Post locking the doors to the post office. The applications for the Christmas program had just arrived in mailboxes.

“I was getting a lot of calls from panicked people, ‘our mail box is locked. We can’t get in it,’” Hartman says. Christmas For Everyone had 219 completed applications before the strike hit. The volunteers went to work, calling several hundred people. “We went through all the applications; 58 of the stack that had… either moved or passed away.”

Many of the people receiving help are either seniors relying on CPP or those who receive the Ontario Disablity Support Program. Hartman and her volunteers worked with officials from the county to make sure as many people would receive Christmas dinner as possible.

“Then there was another stack that we just tried contacting them,” Hartman said. That was difficult since for privacy reasons, the charity wouldn’t leave a message on an answering machine unless it was clear they were calling the right person.

“But we did make attempts…the strike played a huge factor in the number of people applying this year.”
“We do the best we can…we got to the the ones that we could, but other than that, our hands are tied,” Hartman said.

And that could mean more calls heading up to Christmas. Each year, as the hampers are being delivered, the phone at the office rings constantly with people hoping to still receive food in time for Christmas. Hartman says during a normal year, people turn to the Petrolia program because all of the other charities have completed their applications and have turned people away.

This year, she suspects she will get calls because they didn’t receive their application in the mail.